This Week in Game-Guru - 02/19/2018

This week's update will be short and brief.

A few major components that are worth mentioning in my area at the end about my own works.

ENGINE UPDATE PROGRESS REPORT

This week was a HUGE week for Game-Guru.  Lee dropped a new public preview update onto our heads and aside from a minor issue with one of my levels loading a strange view (due to something wonky with the AI waypoint system causing my camera to screw up) it is a MASSIVE improvement.  Speeds are way up.  Weird stutter and lag is gone.  Crashes caused by decals are gone.  Other associated fixes are still on the way.  Impressively, Preben (a forum member who does a lot of code fixes for us) has been getting increasingly involved and it shows.  Updates to the update came in quick succession with minor bugfixes deployed often times in several same-day hotfixes.  It's a huge jump.  Expect a little delay before the next major release as they transition this PP to an actual Game-Guru release around April.  For now, it's a great gift and seems to really run well on my system.

Full notes and information can be found both here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219024
And on the news update here: https://www.game-guru.com/news-post/gameguru-new-public-preview

NEW PRODUCTS IN THE STORE

This week on the store we have several new items.

You're not dreaming, my name is actually up there for once.

Mstockton has put in a low-priced 'burn pile' for junkyards.  I like it though I do wish the texturing was a little better.  That said it's impressively low priced so it could definitely find a home in your inventory.  https://www.tgcstore.net/pack/11005

Also we have several updates - Teabone has added a 'gain health by drinking water' script.  It's expressly listed as being similar to the ones in Skyrim and Fallout.  https://www.tgcstore.net/product/31049

Graphix has also included something eerily reminiscent of fallout - a 'mech hangar'.  This is a nice piece though I do wish he'd have done a little more to differentiate it from Fallout 4's power armor station.  I worry that one might run into some snags legally if they used it in a product for sale.
https://www.tgcstore.net/pack/11006

AlexGCC has put together a DAMN fine building called the 'derelict building'.  This building unfortunately has a slightly ajar door but the overwhelmingly high quality output of the model makes up for that little misgiving I have.  It's priced to sell.  https://www.tgcstore.net/product/31046

Lastly my own product - the Camerakit (aka camkit) is on the store.  This product is expressly designed to make camera work for security monitors, cutscenes, etc much easier for the average user.  More on how and why down below but for now, check out this video:

It can be picked up from the store here:  https://www.tgcstore.net/product/31048  (NOTE - IT'S on sale until 2/25!)

FREE STUFF

The realm of free stuff has really slowed down a lot. 

This is all I could find this week - an updated copy of the sandstone building that comes with the base Game-Guru system: https://forum.game-guru.com/attachment/18255

THIRD PARTY TOOLS

Looks like OldPman is still improving the normalizator utility which I understand will have full PBR support if not now, then soon.  Latest update is as follows:

Hey. Pirate Myke and Earthling45 , thanks for the feedback.
I'm working on expanding the toolkit at the moment and there will be many opportunities added. A square brush, applying text, stamps is the first on my desktop. Adding the color of the texture and several other filters are now also in development. If you had in mind the choice of the color of the brush, then to the left of the alpha under the paint button, there is a rectangle clicking on which you open the colorpicker.
- OldPMan

This is a really good utility I need to get my mitts on when I get some free time.

RANDOM ACTS OF CREATIVITY

There's a lot of stuff on youtube.  I found a new project with a purported '239 hours' of development.  That's quite a lot for a single project!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP4I-Xq1auA

There's also this great lighting tutorial by DuchenKuke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6-7m6QLQMA

He also made a pretty good mountain-making tutorial showcasing an interesting method of using the flattener tool to create realistic shapes.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlLS7Kts9mI

And a totally Russian (I think?) tutorial.  Feel free to watch it if you dare, though I recommend using auto-translate to read it.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb1zCS8kPxw

Lastly Teabone (a generally awesome forum-bro) has been doing some really great scripting work of his own: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVjoOoSRzwg

IN MY OWN WORKS

So I just wanted to bring up a few things, things which are going on in my world here.  Foremost, I have my Camera Kit (shown above!) on the store.  This project has been a while in the making and has some really cool features such as tracking, re-use, multi-camera setups, cutscene style location triggers and more.  I may add a trigger zone in the future but for now I have more than enough to get people started.  This kit came from my work with the Notepad++ API I made.   I realized camera controls in this game engine could be fairly complex.  I wondered if maybe it'd be easier to have a camera that had a place you could easily point to instead of calculating Euler angles and rotations.  I mean who really wants to use a rotation matrix just to figure out where to place a camera?!  So I created a very simple camera system which sort of blossomed from there into an easy to use kit for the 'everyman'. 

Simply place an object, attach the camera initiator, then choose it's target.  Easy!

The multi-cam system works the same, except the camera and initiator are separated so you can multiple cameras. 

Next, I submitted my proposal to a publisher.
What, you ask?

Let me say that again - I submitted my Game-Guru book proposal to a publisher.  I've been in contact with several prominent forum members,  Lee, Rick V, and a publishing house (CRC Press).  I am currently working on a very lengthy print-on-paper book which will be a start to finish guide to Game-Guru.  I'm looking forward to working on that over the next year.  It will be eating a lot of my spare cycles but I don't mind even in the slightest.

The book is probably going to be on the order of 430 pages, tons of pictures, tutorials, a complete walkthrough of how to build a high quality game, and more.  Keep an eye out for more details as I complete the work on it.

This Week in Game-Guru - 1/22/2018

As mentioned previously I should probably get off blogger soon.
Is it just wordpress these days or is there anything else of value out there?

It dawned on me I'm basically doing the job Lee and crew did years ago back when Game-Guru was still fresh and had life to it.  

ENGINE UPDATES:

The following video has all of the latest details and updates on the Game-Guru engine.

That's right, literally nothing, zip, zilch, nada.  Just one cryptic post from Lee about another unrelated project (here) that was received rather poorly by the increasingly salty natives.

NEW ON THE STORE

https://www.tgcstore.net/product/30999 - BSP made a new m9 pistol.  Looks very decent!
https://www.tgcstore.net/pack/11002 - Tarkus continues his efforts in the world of audio for Game-Guru.  It's a smart move and he could easily translate it cross platform if he so chose.  I like his work thus far. This 'star cluster music pack' has a really professional feel to it.  The tracks are well done and have a heavy ambient-style synth vibe to them.  It's slower than his other stuff but definitely has a good feel to it for a space-based game that is not fast paced.  The free samples practically sell it for him.  Even though I'm an owner of his previous work(s) I feel this one has a real good flow to it.  I may purchase it myself soon!
https://www.tgcstore.net/product/31002 - Corrosion's 'enhanced AI'.  Probably is enhanced but I'd prefer to see a video if I'm spending that kind of money on an unproven product.  I'm an AI geek myself; I spent several thousand lines of code writing a pretty landmark AI program that went on to be the basis for the Reaper bot code.  Color me hard to impress, if you will.  Without a video to show the differences, it's hard to justify spending 7 dollars on something that could only be marginally better.  Considering how bad the AI is currently, this is significant.  If anyone purchases this, please let me know what your results are!

THIRD PARTY PROGRAMS:

So in more relevant news (to me, that is), there's a lot going on with third party programs.  To me, this and Lua coded items are where the action are at.  Lee simply takes too long to push his updates and as a result, we're forced to do a lot of the heavy lifting if this thing is ever going to be a functional product.

So first off we have OldPMan's excellent "Normalizator" (wow, what a mouthful) tool starting to beta PBR support.  This is a huge boost to people like me who haven't got the time to invest in learning a whole new workflow for PBR assets!

More info here:  https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/216095?page=6#msg2594115

Also we've had some lively discussions on voice synthesis (robo-talk) software: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219214

And also we have a great thread on converting assets from Makehuman to Mixamo to 'FBX2GG'.

Lastly, I should also mention my own work here.  I recently created a Notepad++ Lua API for Game-Guru.  It's a simple piece but was a time consuming slog with 2400+ lines of XML code to write up.  It will basically auto-complete, give hints, etc for Game Guru and it's associated Lua functions. You can get more info on that here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219215

RANDOM ACTS OF CREATIVITY

https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219234 - Bugsy continues his work on his Wolf's previous FPSC game: Direct Action.  The sequel is called "Direct Action 2" (surprisingly enough) and has some pretty good teaser screenshots:

https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219060 - Duchenkuke has given up on his flagship product 'Cold Contract'; This is unfortunate.  Another high quality potential Game-Guru developer is taking an undefined hiatus from Game-Guru due to production issues.  This is, in my opinion, the biggest plague we have ongoing right now.  We really have a significant hurtle in using Game-Guru with respect to producing titles, primarily our ability to actually 'convert into standalone' and memory issues.  The memory issues, in particular, really cause serious problems in larger projects.  It's a damn shame that yet another great project is being dumped because this issue couldn't get resolved.

https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219206 Lastly, while it's not a WIP, Wolf made a pretty great lightmapping tutorial.  This is the type of thing we need more of.

IN MY OWN WORKS

As mentioned, there's my Notepad++ API that is free for download to help developers get the most out of their Lua coding in Game-Guru.  On top of that I've been intermittently working on my upcoming kit(s) for Game-Guru.  They're heady projects though so it's really eating up cycles to do the things I want to do.  I realize that if I was a slightly better programmer in Lua this probably wouldn't be so tremendously difficult.

That said I've made a lot of progress.  I've integrated weapons and healthkits into my system (ammo was the first thing I used) and now need to find a way to get the enemies to do what I want them to do.  All in all, I'm a solid 2-4 months away from being able to release either of them at this pace.  Maybe as things clear up I'll be able to allot more time.  As it is though, it's only a little here and there.

That wraps it up for this week.  Keep an eye out for an update coming down the pike.  We should see some really great stuff soon if Lee ever deems to open the floodgates.

This week in Game-Guru 12/4/2017

Welcome back to my second update.  We've seen some HUGE updates this week.

ENGINE UPDATE PROGRESS REPORT

First and foremost, the public preview was released this week.  The 'beta' is now a public beta.   Get in there and test!  I ran into a problem installing mine that required me to update certain elements of my Windows 7 OS to fix a D3DDIRECT_47.dll not found error.   Other than that though, it works great.  I've had a few assets with problems and am yet to test my own products but as soon as I can verify their function I'll note that here.

More info is available here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/219024

PBR Assets look great!

Beware though; this is a test version.  It's not all there yet and so it's best to make a backup before you continue.  I personally copied my 50+GB of assets and GG to a backup folder.  If you can't afford that kind of space, then I'd recommend either getting another drive or putting a copy on drive.google.com (you get like 15GB free there).

NEW PRODUCTS IN THE STORE

The store this week has some interesting December sales which are worth looking at.  Artists range from "The Wizard of Id", "that model guy" and "grobyken" all having several models or packs up to individual packs like Teabone's new warning sign set.

These high quality clutter objects cost only 70 cents.. TOTAL!  For the whole pack!

Teabone's done a fantastic job of creating high quality assets that are extremely affordable but possibly more importantly - they are very useful!  I have several signs from older packs that just don't measure up.  They look chunky and out of date.  These signs are clear, easy to read, are well lit but yet still have just the right amount of grunge to keep them from looking out of place.

Also on the store I noticed this gem from an artist I've only seen the occasional piece from: AlexGCC.  I took a look and noticed two separate products which appear relatively new that are of pretty excellent quality:

The Arcade will go well with EAI's set and the playground will go well with dagored's Carnival.

They're both reasonably priced so definitely give these and his other interesting products a look!

FREE STUFF

As always, there's a veritable bevy of free stuff available on the Game-Guru forums.  This week we have a nice freebie from Wolf, a set electrical boxes which he's also put up on the store as well.  I have several of his 'junction box' sets and I've noticed a clear trend upwards in terms of quality and technical skill.  Of note are the illuminated lights on the boxes.

The perfect touch for all your cyberpunk set dressing needs.

Also on the forums it appears Bod's been at it again.  Now if you don't know Bod, you should.  He's made a titanic mass of free stuff over the past few years.  While his art style and approach might limit other assets you can use with it, it does definitely fill a role and niche.  Very often he's got things you simply can't find anywhere else.  Or things that you'd pay a fair penny for on the store.

In this case he's been working on a ton of railroad assets.  This week he's added a switching booth which looks great.  It's probably one of his best physical models for buildings that I've seen so far.

His texturing is really going places.

At some point I'm going to take all my free assets and open up a google drive with them so people can access them freely in the future.  It'd be a shame if this stuff just fell off into oblivion from lack of upkeep or if the forums went away.

The interior on this building is top notch.  I love the way it turned out.

One final one to look at is this thread: https://forum.game-guru.com/board/25 which has a repository of all of "tarkus1971"s hard work.  He's got some interesting things there but most notably he has been adding lots of great music for free use in your games.

THIRD PARTY TOOLS

In the world of third party tools, it looks like BOTR's 'HeightMap to Game-Guru' tool is getting a new user interface which will really help with it's function.  On top of that he's added a preview mode which should REALLY shave time off pulling maps from http://terrain.party and importing them into Game-Guru. Granted I'm really thankful for a free tool like this but I have to admit it's always nice when it becomes truly functional.

This is going to massively help level development for Game-Guru!

Also of note is that OldPMan's "normalizator" tool has apparently reached a new stage of development and will be offered shortly on the store.  Per OldPMan himself:

"Hello everybody!
I'm happy to report that I finally recovered the lost source code "NORMALIZATOR". So I added a height channel and several auxiliary functions, this is copying the image from layer to layer, cropping the image and copying / pasting the selected part of the image. Fixed several bugs.
Now I will have all my time in touch and any questions will not be left without attention.
Concerning people who donated to the development of the application, I sent everyone emails with the keys for NORMALIZATOR in the tgcstore store. I noticed that not all of the keys I sent were activated, if for some reason you did not receive a letter with a key from me, write me a PM and I will give you instructions for obtaining a key in the tgcstore store.
The new version will soon be available at the tgcstore store, now in the status of approval.
For those who expect STEAM version, now you can get access to the closed beta test of the application, just write me a PM and I'll send you the key for access via STEAM client."

RANDOM ACTS OF CREATIVITY

So there's a lot of activity going into the holidays with projects.  I have a lot to cover here.

Let's start from the top!

First up we have MrEaKing(YT)'s 'Santa's Workshop(1 week challenge)'.  What can I say?  He's retextured assets and modified some of the soldiers to provide a shall we say a truly 'unique' experience.

Beyond that we have Dark Harbour; Honkeyboy's newest attempt at making a Skyrim Style game which will undoubtedly push the boundaries of how many assets Game-Guru can run without crashing.  He's got some interesting crafting scripts in there that he's working on and it's definitely got some work behind it.

Of particular note here is AmenMoses's 'asteroids-ish thingy'.  AmenMoses is the maker of the quaternion library for Game Guru and he uses it for rotation in very impressive fashion.

I'll have to play with it later but should run great, knowing AmenMoses.

Beyond that we have some updates to the Cogwheel Chronicles 1 and LenTheMan's Cowboy shooter.  Lots of good stuff in the pipeline.

Personally I have my own projects as well that are stalled out but will revive after the new year.  Lots of things to work on and do.  I'd like to get some stuff done for Christmas but it's really going to be tight at this rate.